Well that time of the year again, when the DOT seeks to hand out money as part of the Small Community Air Development (SCASD) program.

SCASD is meant to help communities enhance air transportation by providing temporary financial support.

Grants can be utilized to attract new air-service by establishing revenue guarantees, cost offsets, or marketing support. Additionally grant funding can be utilized to help retain or expand current service, plus for various airport facility upgrades in order to make them more attractive for air service providers.

For this years grants, due to the federal budget sequester the available award pool funding was reduced to $11.5 million.

As in past years, the selection criteria the DOT shall consider includes:

o Air fares are higher than the national average
o The community provide a portion of the cost of the activity from local sources other than airport revenue
o Facilitate new or improved air carrier service to the public
o Provide benefits to a broad segment of the traveling public, whose access to the national air transportation system is limited
o Grant will be used in a timely manner.

Applications are due to the DOT by July 26th.

I'll post application summaries in this thread as they become available.

Kill this program. Let the market place decide. We have spent enough tax money proping up commercial flying operations. If a town/city has the 'business" to support the flying, great, a company will serve the market. If not, drive or charter a 135 operator.

While there are failures, there are also quite a few successes, where sustained commercial service continues beyond the grant. (I don't have statistics on what the success rate is, it would be interesting to know. I've heard it's as much as half.) In those cases of success beyond the grant, it worked exactly how it's supposed to. I don't think 100% success should be expected; indeed, this is government stepping in to assist with risk where airlines and communities are unable to assume that initial risk. Government incubation and other assistance in commercial ventures happens everywhere: pharmaceuticals, petroleum industry, automotive industry, aerospace (duh!), high tech. Some work, some don't. I guess it depends on one's view of the role of government and where one can draw that line.

Quoting SPREE34 (Reply 1):Kill this program. Let the market place decide. We have spent enough tax money proping up commercial flying operations. If a town/city has the 'business" to support the flying, great, a company will serve the market. If not, drive or charter a 135 operator.

I've said this many times in the past, but the United States is a country that is bound and determined to ensure that rural communities get more resources than they pay in for - that's why every state gets two senators no matter their population (among other things). If we want to maintain the rural lifestyle (which we do, because that's "real America," supposedly), it comes at a cost - one of which is that we pay a lot more to ensure air service to very small communities.

If the U.S. really was based on a free market economy, larger and larger cities would absolutely have all of the resources and very little would be left for the sticks. That's not how it works though.

I have an idea, just a thought.
How about wait until you have the proposals from the various cities and then post the thread.
This would direct conversation more directly to the proposals than the beaten to death 'kill the program, end all subsidies, etc' rhetoric that always shows up on here. Just a thought.

As for me personally, I like to see this program more so than EAS, since the actual locations have to somewhat wrangle over the money as opposed to let airlines get $$ to fly one person once a week to Dipstick,WV or wherever. I believe that the SCASD is a better use of the money. Maybe switch from EAS set up to same $$ being dispersed via SCASD outlet.

Oh, and I want $3,000,000 to help entice and market a flight between Pasco,WA and Richland,WA. Much like the Tidewater area of VA, the I-182 bridge over the Columbia River can sometimes have as many as 25 cars on it simultaneously! If one is in Richland, this can add 2 minutes to the drive to Tri-Cities Airport!

Quoting SPREE34 (Reply 1):Kill this program. Let the market place decide. We have spent enough tax money proping up commercial flying operations. If a town/city has the 'business" to support the flying, great, a company will serve the market. If not, drive or charter a 135 operator.

I would agree with you if the airlines were more open to trying things that they don't consider a 100000% sure thing and if they were 100% accurate at determining which markets need served and which dont. Because these decisions are all made, at the end of the day, by humans this isn't the case. There are plenty of routes out there that started because of the SCASD program that ended up being great for the airline, the airports involved, and subsequently the economies of both cities involved. It's safe to say that some of these wouldn't have ever happened without the program.

If you're from a big city then you probably don't see air service through the same eyes as someone from a smaller town that isn't awarded the same opportunities by the airlines. SCASD is the only way a CRW-IAH route would have ever happened, and that's apparently been good for everyone involved.

I think a valid debate over SCASD is the rather slim long term out comes it produces.

Yes there are certainly successes, and some markets have today enjoy air service thanks the incubator environment SCASD produces, however I can only remember about a handful of such cases out of maybe 100 awards the last 5-years.

Way too often once the money dries up (maximum 3-year term on SCASD grants), the experiment goes away and ends up having looked just like an EAS route where the government directly funded for the flying during the period.

In an industry where there are fewer and fewer potential airlines, and where there is a tidal shift away from smaller planes and communities anyhow, I am not sure SCASD is doing much except being a small sand castle on a beach next to a big ocean.

So with limited federal dollars is SCASD really something that produces a good return for the nation?

Quoting KarlB737 (Reply 10):Isn't Great Lakes Aviation totally dependent on this program. If the program went away not that it should or shouldn't wouldn't they actually have to approach markets and offer service.

Great Lakes lives on the Essential Air Service (EAS) program, a much larger and more expensive federal program.

Quoting LAXintl (Reply 9):Yes there are certainly successes, and some markets have today enjoy air service thanks the incubator environment SCASD produces, however I can only remember about a handful of such cases out of maybe 100 awards the last 5-years.

Some airports have used their SCASD grants for non-air service purposes. FWA is one airport that thought outside the box and used a SCASD grant to equip the terminal with an AirIT CUTE system, which has led to more gate flexibility and easier handling of diversions from the likes of ORD and DTW. When DTW gets closed for weather and DL needs a diversion point, they can come to FWA and park at any open gate - same goes for ORD and AA/UA. Even G4 has used FWA as a diversion point after the CUTE system was installed.

That's not to say that FWA has used SCASD for air service; they got one SCASD grant for C8 (ATA Connection) to MDW. The route went away when C8 went away, but it was successful when it ran (FWA even bought and bulldozed a hotel to expand airport parking). More importantly, C8 proved that FWA could support an LCC (and they got another one two years later in the form of G4, which came thanks to airport authority incentives and not SCASD).

Quoting flyinryan99 (Reply 2):Then kill every other grant program. I don't see how this is different than any other grant program out there. EAS is a different story.

Quoting ytib (Reply 5):The SCASD application process is what the Boyd Group refers to as Christmas in July

EAS should be eliminated in every market where there is not another served airport within 150-200 miles by road. SCASD is just a perversion of the free market system. If a community wants to spend its own money to support better air service for economic development that is fine, but to take federal money to encourage airlines to move planes from one place to another is the height of waste. At the federal level it produces no net gain in economic activity and thus should not be a federal program.

Quoting LAXintl (Reply 9):
I think a valid debate over SCASD is the rather slim long term out comes it produces.

The fact that most SCASD grants go unused is indication of the flimsy viability of the whole concept and the award process.

The EAS guys are really really good at drying up a market so they don't have to carry any pesky passengers so that they can just fly more or less empty planes around with the taxpayer picking up the tab.

Quoting planespotting (Reply 4):If the U.S. really was based on a free market economy, larger and larger cities would absolutely have all of the resources and very little would be left for the sticks. That's not how it works though.

If the U.S. really was a free market economy, then there would be no airports owned or operated by cities or counties. Compare your airport system with those over here in the UK, where aside from a few remote airports in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, every airport is in private ownership.

Kind of makes me chuckle to hear the political right laying into Amtrak every year (a public transport system providing essential service to many remote communities that has to fight for every dollar of its funding every single year) while overlooking the amount of tax payers dollars poured into airport infrastructure.

Do you think you could see something like a proposal to find a suitor for a BLI midwest/east coast route? With the recent success in BLI for AS, F9 and G4, it seems like the next step would be to push for something eastward.

Quoting jamesontheroad (Reply 14):If the U.S. really was a free market economy, then there would be no airports owned or operated by cities or counties.

Unless you believe that a free market economy requires that the government own nothing (hardly a defensible position, and certainly not the case in the United Kingdom), what's wrong with government ownership of airports?

Some months ago I asked 9K about the time it was taking to get service to BID and the PR locale announced. They responded that they were having difficulty in obtaining the appropriate a/c (Islander as I had read in proposal IIRC) that they would put it off to 2014.
Somehow I don't think this will come to fruitin, as much as I'd like to fly a BNI from PVD instead of going to Westerly,RI.
However, I also do not agree that 9K should get a grant when New England Airlines has been serving BID form Westerly for over 40 years.
Anyway...............

Now this is a bit of an eye raiser for me. CRW does need some service if they want to revitalize their economy, but I'm not sure who they can attract. the loss of the DL flight to CVG reportedly had a lot of negative impact.

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25 AVLAirlineFreq
: Others with more intimate knowledge of the market can provide more insight, but my first guess was they'd like to replace the NYC service they lost w

26 pvd757
: SJU-CPX and PVD-BID will happen. I suspect early 2014 but it is contingent on 9K getting aircraft for those short runways.

27 LAXintl
: Del Rio grant proposal is supposed to be for service to DFW with AA.

28 crj900lr
: Near the end before going out of business, Air Midwest flew a lot of EAS/SCASD routes. Some of them were: DFW-JBR PIT-LNS DFW-HOT MCI-to various citi

29 steeler83
: Youngstown should try and rebuild its economy, thus potentially generating more demand for air travel. Right now, it's right smack in between two lar